Pacific Patrol

The Pacific Patrol was America’s primary (though not exclusive) super-team active in the Pacific Theatre during World War II. Headquartered in Yankee Doodle’s underground stronghold in Emerald City, Washington, it was active from January 1942 through January 1946, though some of its members were active in the superheroic community on the West Coast in the years before and after the war. Unlike their contemporaries the Liberty League, the Pacific Patrol saw itself as an agent of the US military and took as active a role in fighting overseas as it did in patrolling the homefront. (Yankee Doodle’s 'advanced technology' (which included teleportation) helped substantially there, allowing the Pacific Patrol to quite literally ‘patrol’ everywhere on the Pacific Rim by the end of 1945).

Founded after a raid on the city by agents of the Green Dragon Society, the Patrol consisted of Yankee Doodle, a flying strongman from “an all-American future!” in a patriotic costume, Grand Old Flag, a mysterious woman in a full-body American flag costume, the top-hatted and tuxedoed mystic Mr. Mystery, alien visitor The Ambassador, and the crack shot and special agent OSS operative Agent Five. Fighting on the front lines as they did, they suffered casualties when fighting Japan and its special forces. Mr. Mystery was eventually replaced by the California Bear after the former was killed in combat during the Battle of Tarawa, while the Ambassador returned home in 1943 and was replaced by the armored hero Broadside. Despite occasional cooperation with other Pacific front teams such as Canada's western continent, as well as British and Anzac heroes, the team generally preferred to operate directly under US auspices.

Though they occasionally fought agents of the Green Dragon Society, the Pacific Patrol typically tangled with forces working directly under the auspices of the Japanese military - most famously the Hōfuku sochi, a team formed in 1942 just after the Doolittle Raid on Japan. Unlike the Green Dragon Society, the Hōfuku sochi, who took the names of Susanoo, Ryujin, and Uzume, remain popular in Japan today - though much of their memory as 'honorable warriors of empire' has been hijacked by Japan's militant right-wing in recent years. As far as the general public knows, at war’s end, the team served in occupied Japan for a few months before returning to Emerald City and going their separate ways - this is one reason why there’s relatively little commemoration of the Pacific Patrol in Emerald city proper - though they defended the city during the war, it was never really their home. Yankee Doodle returned to his own era, Grand Old Flag and Broadside retired to anonymity, Agent Five went to work for AEGIS, and California Bear returned to his home in Redding, California where he continued his super-career until his retirement in 1963.

Revisionist historians have in recent years pointed out a number of flaws in the team’s legacy - none of them took a stand to prevent the internment of Japanese-Americans in the Pacific, or to stem the at-times vicious fighting in the Pacific theater. Indeed, by all accounts most of them actively participated in the carnage. The image of Yankee Doodle with a Japanese skull on his desk, printed in Life Magazine in 1944, remains one of the most enduring images of the war in the Pacific - a sign that even heroes could be corrupted by the horrors of the bloody war in the Pacific. Nonetheless, the team’s legacy is certainly not all bad - in addition to their heroic role in fighting the Japanese military and its agents, in the field they saved Japanese lives as well as Allied, and were among the first Americans into Japan after its surrender. Historians have found strong evidence that Broadside was really Jose Trinidad, a Filipino engineer who had escaped along with MacArthur and who returned to his own country after independence to become the hero Magkabaluti, and Ambassador is widely believed to have been a Lor - but the identity of the rest of the team remains a mystery, as does the location of their headquarters, somewhere under Emerald City, Washington.

GM Note:

[In addition to the secrets mentioned above, the true story of the end of the Pacific Patrol comes in late 1945, not long after V-J Day. Claiming he was always eager to learn about “the Americans of this distant age”, the war had seemed to make Yankee Doodle increasingly unhinged; gradually adopting the worst qualities of his ‘ancestors,’ qualities which spread to much of the rest of the team by example - and if they were honest with each other, because it made things easier that way. Long uncomfortable with his growing racism, violence in the field, and increasingly frequent sexual advances, Grand Old Flag (who wore her full-body costume to disguise her own true identity), finally learned the truth about Yankee Doodle’s nature during clean-up efforts in Nagasaki just after the second atomic bombing there.

Left with no other choice, she snapped his neck and used the teleporter at his belt to return to Emerald City. When the rest of the team learned the same truth about their former leader, they reluctantly agreed to leave Doodle’s body in his own vaults - and to never speak of what they learned. His body lies there still, the location of his headquarters forgotten by the general public. The truth about Yankee Doodle, Grand Old Flag, their team, and the reality of the Pacific War is left as an exercise for the reader. A good place to look might be in Agent Five's extensive reports to the OSS - which would later provide a clandestine basis for the investigation into the Liberty League in the 50s - or in the unpublished memoirs of California Bear, still in his family's home in northern California.]